Dick Costolo Doesn’t Want You to Worry About Twitter’s Business

NEW YORK — Facing yet another series of questions about the commercial prospects of Twitter, CEO Dick Costolo let his frustration with that particular line of inquiry show through: “Look, I appreciate everyone’s concern for our business, but it’s working phenomenally well,” Costolo told a crowd at the Wired business conference Tuesday. “When I go to bed at night I don’t think, ‘Oh no, the business.’”

Costolo didn’t blink when Twitter’s projected annual revenues were ballparked at $250 million (nor did he in any way confirm that number). “But when you compare that say, to Google, that’s not a rocket ship takeoff, can it grow?” Wired’s Steven Levy asked Costolo.

“The short answer is yes, we are confident we have a hit and this business will grow,” Costolo replied. “But I am never going to optimize short-term revenue at the expense of user experience or long-term goals. If people think we are going about this too cautiously, they can think that and I don’t care.”

That philosophy carries through to the prospect of Twitter going public any time soon. With a private funding last summer totaling $800 million at a reported $8 billion valuation, Twitter is phenomenally flush. “If you have a great business, and that business is growing in a way that is satisfying to you, then you can be a public company when you want to be a public company,” Costolo says. “There is no window of opportunity that you have to hurry up and leap through.”

So if it’s not the business, and it’s not plotting an IPO, what does Costolo ponder at night? In a word, it’s scale.

Since he took over as CEO 18 months ago, Twitter has gone from 50 people to 1,000 employees. As managers were piling in from places like Google and eBay or promoted from within Twitter, Costolo saw a consistent Twitter management style evaporate. “I realized that all my managers were managing differently,” Costolo says. To bring thing back to a more uniform approach, Costolo created a five-hour management course at Twitter, which he teaches personally.

“What I have been focused on in the last 18 months has been about organizational clarity and trying to organize the company in a way that allows us to build and deliver product more efficiently,” Costolo says.

“What I think about at night are questions like, ‘Are we too design heavy, are we too engineer heavy, what is the balance?’” Costolo says. “’Is there too much bureaucracy standing in everyone’s way?’ That is what I worry about, not how we will make money.”